Incredible tattoo artist transformed his wife's tattoo of their trans son

Tattoos may be permanently on your skin, but what happens when your tattoo is majorly outdated? According to Canada-based tattoo artist Steve Peace, you use your badass skills and revamp it to make it better than ever.

About a decade ago, Steve gave tattoos of their three children to his wife, Lindsay. And although tattoos naturally need retouching over time, one of the portraits needed more retouching than the rest. The tattoo of their oldest son, Ace — now 15 — was inaccurate, because Ace is trans. “A lot of trans people don’t like pictures of themselves from their past,” Steve told BuzzFeed News. “That’s one that sort of walked around with us, as a family.”

Plus, Steve explained, it was an uncomfortable situation to have to constantly explain Ace’s situation whenever anyone asked about Lindsay’s tattoos. “[W]e need[ed] to update the tattoo to fully represent who he is in his happy new awesome life,” Steve wrote on his Facebook page.

“I felt it didn’t reflect me very much, that it wasn’t so much our family, because that person didn’t exist anymore,” Ace told Global Calgary.

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Steve Peace’s eldest son is an awesome FTM transgender male. So what do you do with outdated tattoos on the wife? You…

The revamped version erased the old version’s pigtails, replaced a purple bow with a slingshot, and changed the dress to a blue shirt and khaki shorts. They surprised Ace with the new tattoo only weeks after he told his parents he was transgender. “It made me really happy because I didn’t realize how much she believed me,” he told Global Calgary. “It finally fits.”

“I think it really reaffirmed, for him, that we believed him,” Steve told BuzzFeed. “Parents often sit in the closet themselves. This was putting it out there.”

After the tattoo shop shared the image on their Facebook page, they’ve been getting a ton of awesome responses, and for amazing reason. The tattoo is absolutely fabulous, but what it symbolizes — true acceptance of their son’s gender identity — is something that Lindsay should be truly proud to have inked.